the distinction of being Broadside’s first hardcover
publication. Randall also created an audio series,
Broadside Voices, of poets reading their own books
on tape.
Although the 1960s witnessed a proliferation
of black presses, including Lee’s (Madhubuti’s)
THIRD WORLD PRESS in Chicago and Baraka’s Jihad
Press in New Jersey, as Randall himself concluded,
“Broadside set the precedent” (quoted in Boyd,
235). As Randall further explained, “There was
something further in the air in the ’60s, and the
poetry was new too.... The political climate, the
sit-ins and the civil demonstrations focused atten-
tion on the black revolt. Poetry is more emotional
than prose, and it was time for emotions” (235).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boyd, Melba Joyce. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley
Randall and the Broadside Press. New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 2003.
Gayle, Addison, ed. The Black Aesthetic. Garden City,
N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1972.
Wilfred D. Samuels
Brooks, Gwendolyn (1917–2002)
Gwendolyn Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in
Topeka, Kansas, to schoolteacher Keziah Corinne
Wims and janitor David Anderson Brooks. The
family moved to Chicago five weeks later, where
she was raised. She graduated from high school
and completed her formal education at Wilson Ju-
nior College in 1936 and then worked for a short
time as a maid and secretary. Two years later she
joined Chicago’s NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE
ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE Youth Coun-
cil, and a year later she married Henry Lowington
Blakely II. The young couple lived in a kitchenette
apartment (similar to the one described in her
novel MAU D MARTHA) at 63rd and Chaplain in
Chicago above a real-estate agency.
Like LANGSTON HUGHES and JAMES WELDON
JOHNSON, who would critique her work and men-
tor her, Brooks is best known for her poetry. Her
first poem appeared in American Child magazine
when Brooks was only 13. Three years later JAMES
WELDON JOHNSON had read and critiqued her
poetry. When she graduated from high school in
1935, she was already a regular contributor to the
weekly variety column of The Chicago Defender,
a black newspaper, in which she also published a
number of her poems.
Brooks studied poetry with Inez Cunningham
Stark at a community art center on the South Side
of Chicago. She would later teach creative writing to
one of the South Side’s best-known youth “gangs,”
the Blackstone Rangers. Winning the Midwestern
Writers’ Conference poetry award in 1943 led to
the publication of her first collection of poems, A
Street in Bronzeville (1945). Her other collections
include Annie Allen (1949), Maud Martha (1953),
The Bean Eaters (1961), and In the Mecca (1968).
In 1950 Brooks became the first black writer to
win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry (for Annie Allen).
She also published Bronzeville Boys and Girls
(1956), poems for children. During this period she
also wrote reviews and articles that were published
in the New York Times, Negro Digest, and the New
York Herald Tribune. She represented in a variety
of poetic forms the human condition from a black
perspective. Much of her work concentrates on the
people who live in a small Chicago community.
Brooks’s first book of poetry, A Street in
Bronzeville, celebrates the ordinary lives of a group
of ordinary urban dwellers who live in a commu-
nity that resembles Chicago’s South Side. Brooks
sacrifices overt protest in favor of focusing on
the everyday lives of preachers, gamblers, maids,
beauty shop owners, and other members of the
black community of Bronzeville. In “the mother,”
for example, she provides an extraordinarily sensi-
tive treatment of a woman’s afterthoughts about
having experienced multiple abortions. “The Sun-
days of Satin-Legs Smith” takes the reader through
a typical Sunday in the life of a Bronzeville man
who relishes that day in particular when he can
dress in his zoot suit and strut through the com-
munity. The poem tracks Satin-Leg Smith’s per-
sonal history of social and economic deprivation
while celebrating the minor triumph represented
by his ordinary Sunday pleasures—from his cof-
fee and rolls for breakfast, to the BLUES he hears as
he strolls through the community, to an eveningBrooks, Gwendolyn 73